Just three months ago, with Newt Gingrich trailing four other candidates for the Republican
presidential nomination, the former House Speaker appeared in
Las Vegas at Mundo, a Mexican restaurant, for a $500-a-plate
fundraiser.

“I promise you one thing,” Gingrich told the crowd. “The
day I become president is the day that entrepreneurs are going
to be able to smile again.”

Grinning at the head table was casino billionaire Sheldon Adelson, chief executive officer of Las Vegas Sands Corp., and
his wife, Miriam. They gave Gingrich a standing ovation,
according to George Harris, a finance co-chairman of Gingrich’s
campaign and organizer of the event. It was a boost at a time
when an October Gallup poll showed Gingrich with only 7 percent
of the vote.

“No one gave Newt a chance,” Harris said in a telephone
interview.

Adelson, 78, and Miriam, 66, have contributed $10 million
in recent weeks to a political action committee fueling
Gingrich’s primary battles in South Carolina and Florida. While
the Adelsons and Gingrich have similar opinions on limiting
government spending and reducing taxes, they share a bond in
their support of Israel, according to Harris.

“Sheldon Adelson is very deeply concerned about the
survival of Israel,” Gingrich, 68, told reporters while
campaigning today in Cocoa, Florida. “I promised him I would
seek to defend the United States and the United States’s
allies.”

Super-PAC

Adelson gave $5 million to Winning Our Future, the
Lawrenceville, Georgia-based independent political-action
committee run by Gingrich’s former aides. Known as a super-PAC,
such a group isn’t limited by campaign finance laws and donation
limits, though federal law prohibits coordination between super-
PACs and candidates.

Winning Our Future bought the video “When Mitt Romney Came
to Town,” which highlighted job losses at businesses taken
private when Romney -- depicted as “more ruthless than Wall
Street” -- headed Bain Capital LLC, a Boston-based private-
equity company. Gingrich asked the group to fix any inaccuracies
or refrain from airing the ad.

The donation helped blunt Romney’s financial advantage.
Through Sept. 30, the most recent date for which Federal
Election Commission reports are available, Romney had raised
more than $32.2 million, compared with $2.9 million for
Gingrich. Two weeks after the video’s release, Gingrich won the
South Carolina Republican primary, taking 40 percent to Romney’s
28 percent.

Florida Battle

Even after his South Carolina win, with Romney and his
super-PAC, Restore Our Future, already airing $4 million in
commercials for the Florida primary, Gingrich’s camp reached out
to the Adelsons anew.

To counter Romney, Miriam Adelson, an Israeli-born
physician, contributed an additional $5 million to the
committee, according to a person close to the matter who wasn’t
authorized to speak publicly. Winning Our Future yesterday said
it had invested in $6 million of commercials in the Sunshine
State.

“Our motivation for helping Newt is simple and should not
be mistaken for anything other than the fact that we hold our
friendship with him very dear and are doing what we can as
private citizens to support his candidacy,” the Adelsons said
in a statement.

‘Friendship and Loyalty’

“Our means of support might be more than others are able
to offer, but like most Americans, words such as friendship and
loyalty still mean something to us,” they said.

A Gingrich campaign spokesman, R.C. Hammond, said that
while the top donors to the PAC supporting the former speaker’s
candidacy were made public, contributors to the pro-Romney
political committee have remained secret. PACs next will have to
report their donors on Jan. 31.

The money has been “very helpful” in giving Gingrich’s
campaign the momentum it’s seeing now, according to Sig Rogich,
a Las Vegas-based Republican political consultant. Gingrich
leads in some Florida primary polls.

“I think it has the potential to make a significant
difference in the campaign,” Rogich said.

A Romney spokeswoman, Andrea Saul, declined to comment in
an e-mail.

Political Spending

Arizona Senator John McCain, a Romney backer who’s long
advocated for stricter campaign finance rules, pointed to
Adelson’s donations as an example of what he sees as out-of-
control political spending.

“You have one family throwing in $10 million into a
primary race,” McCain told reporters on a conference call
today. “I don’t think that’s what our founding fathers had in
mind.”

Adelson, whose worth was estimated by Forbes magazine at
$21.5 billion in September, is the eighth-richest American,
behind investor George Soros, at $22 billion, and ahead of Jim
Walton, the son of Wal-Mart Stores Inc. founder Sam Walton, at
$21.1 billion.

In the 2010 election cycle, Adelson ranked seventh in the
U.S. among campaign contributors, giving $224,800, almost all of
it to Republicans, according to the Center for Responsive
Politics, a Washington-based research group.

Adelson donated $1 million in 2006 to help start American
Solutions for Winning the Future, a political group founded by
Gingrich that helped the former speaker travel to lay the
groundwork for his presidential bid, Internal Revenue Service
records show. The group closed last year after Gingrich left to
run for president. Between its founding and collapse, Adelson
gave $7.7 million to the group.

Far more of the Adelsons’ money has gone to causes
supporting Israel. The couple contributed more than $100 million
since 2007 to Taglit-Birthright Israel, which offers free, 10-
day educational trips to Israel for young people, according to
Jacob Dallal, a spokesman for the group. They are longstanding
benefactors of Yad Vashem, a Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem.

Gingrich drew fire in December when he said in an interview
on The Jewish Channel, a cable network, that while Jews had a
right to their own country, “we’ve had an invented Palestinian
people.”

Hammond, his press secretary, later said that the candidate
backs “a negotiated peace agreement between Israel and the
Palestinians, which will necessarily include agreement between
Israel and the Palestinians over the borders of a Palestinian
state.”

1995 Meeting

The Adelsons first recall meeting Gingrich in the Capitol
Rotunda after a 1995 Congressional vote over moving the U.S.
embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, according to a person with
knowledge of the relationship. The person wasn’t authorized to
discuss the family publicly and declined to be named.

Miriam Adelson, in particular, admires Gingrich because of
her view that he speaks his mind and fights for what he believes
in, according to the person.

Sheldon Adelson’s views of Israel have been shaped in part
by his wife, who served in the Israeli military and runs an
addiction clinic in Tel Aviv, in addition to her Las Vegas
office. The couple keeps a home in Israel as well as residences
in Las Vegas, the south of France, and Malibu, California.

Strong support for a cause is characteristic of Adelson,
who is known for his feisty independence whether battling
contractors over the cost of his casinos, county officials over
tourism taxes or labor unions about their representation in his
hotels, according to William Thompson, a professor of public
administration at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

‘Perpetual Fights’

“He’s been in perpetual fights with everybody,” Thompson
said in a telephone interview. “He uses his financial power.
He’s unafraid to go out on his own.”

Adelson’s two Las Vegas casinos, the Venetian and the
Palazzo, are the only ones on the Strip that don’t use union
labor, according to D. Taylor, secretary-treasurer of Culinary
Workers Union Local 226.

“He has fought us tooth and nail and probably will until
the day he dies,” Taylor said in a telephone interview.
“Newt’s agenda is very much against workers and unions. I’m not
surprised they hooked up.”

Adelson’s Las Vegas Sands Corp. (LVS), the world’s biggest casino
operator by market value, is being investigated by the U.S.
Securities and Exchange Commission and the U.S. Justice
Department, which have sought documents related to compliance
with the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act at its unit in China’s
Macau, company filings show. The law prohibits companies that
operate in the U.S. from bribing foreign officials.

Battling Establishment

The company is cooperating with investigators and Adelson
has repeatedly said he’s sure it will be cleared of wrongdoing.

Adelson has said he sees his life as that of an outsider
battling the establishment.

“My m.o. has been to change the status quo,” he said in a
November 2010 interview with Bloomberg News. “When I started
off in business, I started off behind the starting line. I came
from the wrong side of the tracks. I had to do things
differently.”

The son of a cab driver from Boston’s working-class
Dorchester section, Adelson hawked the Boston Globe on street
corners and built a business selling packages of shaving cream
and shampoo to hotels. He later founded Comdex, a Las Vegas
technology trade show that he sold to Japanese software
distributor Softbank Corp. for $862 million in 1995.

Casino Builder

Segueing into casinos, Adelson built the Venetian in Las
Vegas, a property catering to convention attendees and tourists,
starting a trend in Sin City of hotel-adjacent meeting space and
business-friendly amenities.

“He’s one of the pioneers of this town,” Rogich said.
“He’s done as much for anyone in the history of the city,
including Steve Wynn.”

Like Wynn, whose Wynn Resorts Ltd. is the second-largest
U.S. casino operator by market value, Adelson’s biggest score
came from developing casinos in Macau, the former Portuguese
territory turned over to China. Gambling revenue there overtook
the Las Vegas Strip in 2006.

After financial markets collapsed in 2008 when he still had
properties under construction in Macau, Singapore and Las Vegas,
Adelson had to chip in $1 billion of his family’s money to keep
Las Vegas Sands afloat. The shares have appreciated about 800
percent since January 2009.

“So what am I, the comeback kid?” Adelson said in 2010.
“I’ll make you a compromise: the comeback old fogy.”